Expecting the unexpected: Examining the interplay between real-world knowledge and contextual cues during language comprehension

Communication frequently involves discussions about real-world implausible events. Since most prior research used specific contextual cues to indicate a strong bias towards real-world knowledge violations, it remains unclear how real-world and contextual knowledge interact when the context is relatively unconstraining (e.g., dream scenarios), where both plausible and implausible information is supported. We investigated this issue using sentence completion (Experiment 1) and self-paced reading tasks (Experiment 2). Results of Experiment 1 showed that comprehenders were guided by the dream context to expect less plausible information in a general way, but their expectations were still largely constrained by real-world knowledge. Results of Experiment 2 showed that although comprehension in such contexts was initially guided by real-world knowledge, plausible information became more difficult to comprehend than implausible information (e.g., "putting meat and vegetables in the refrigerator_plausible/wardrobe_implausible") at the final regions of the target sentence. Our study is the first to show that context is powerful enough to guide comprehenders towards expecting world knowledge violations even without explicit constraints indicating this bias, which is mainly driven by increased comprehension difficulties for plausible contents rather than decreased difficulties for implausible ones. Importantly, our findings raise new questions about how comprehenders switch from an old situation model to a new one. They also indicate necessary extensions for language comprehension models, highlighting that information unrelated to both real-world and contextual knowledge in any direct way (i.e., information with extremely low cloze probability) can still be ultimately preferred in certain contexts.